PHOTOGRAPHING THE POPE: People took pictures of Pope Benedict XVI during his weekly audience in Saint Peter’s Square in Vatican City Wednesday. (Max Rossi/Reuters)

IN PARLIAMENT: Democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi, in purple, attended the Pyithu Hluttaw, the lower house of Parliament, Wednesday in Naypyitaw, Myanmar. She had formerly been under house arrest. (Nyein Chan Naing/European Pressphoto Agency)

FRONT AND CENTER: Janos Ader took his oath as president of Hungary during a swearing-in ceremony in Hungarian Parliament in Budapest Wednesday. Parliament elected him to a five-year term by a vote of 262-40. (Laszlo Beliczay/MTI/Associated Press)

WHIPPING THEIR HAIR: Eunuchs danced as they re-enacted a story from the Indian epic ‘Mahabharata’ during the annual Koovagam transgender festival south of Chennai, India, Wednesday. (Arun Sankar/Associated Press)

PAINT IN THE FACE: A police officer paused after being hit in the face with paint as officers advanced on Occupy protesters blocking an intersection during a May Day rally in Oakland, Calif., Tuesday. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Friedrich Seidenstücker (1882-1966) didn’t sell his first photograph until he was 46. Trained as a sculptor, he never lost his eye for mass and form. His photographs of Berlin daily life during the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s freeze passersby in poses either accidentally graceful or, more frequently, droll and ungainly. In ‘Shine’ (1925), four women clamber out of a swimming pool; the title refers to the wet gleam of the fabric on their behinds. Elsewhere in ‘Friedrich Seidenstücker: Of Hippos and Other Humans, Photographs 1925-1958′ (Hatje Cantz, 327 pages, $60), a man hinges awkwardly at the waist, leaning over a railing to get a better look into a cage at the zoo. Seidenstücker relished confounding man and beast, as in the image of a curious rhino peering at a seemingly captive zookeeper (above). On a trip to Copenhagen, he snapped a man whose splay-footed waddle evokes nothing so much as a penguin—indeed, he is dragging a box of fish down the sidewalk. But the irony on display in the book’s more than 200 images can seem a bit like moral disengagement when one recalls that the era saw the Nazis’ rise, World War II and the dismembering of Berlin itself. ‘This entire period did not agree with me’ was Seidenstücker’s understated explanation—though during the war he sustained a Jewish friend with gifts of food. Even his shots of postwar rubble work hard to avoid the abyss. Kids and picnickers make the best of the ruins, napping amid the broken bricks or heaping them into playful piles.

WATCH THAT SAND: People napped in the sand dunes on the German North Sea Island of Borkum Friday. (Reinhold Grigoleit/European Pressphoto Agency)

PAST AND FUTURE: Men of the Lebanese Druze religious sect mourned the death of Sheikh Abou Mohammad Jawad Walieddine, the head of the spiritual Druze council at his house in the village of Baakline, Lebanon, Friday. The body of the 96-year-old was displayed in a glass coffin. (Mohamad Azakir/Reuters)

STANDOFF IN LONDON: A man threw a computer monitor out of a window on London’s Tottenham Court Road Friday. After an hours-long standoff, police arrested the 49-year-old man, who had entered the office of a drivers’ training company claiming to be armed with gas canisters. (Getty Images)

HARD FALL: A bear fell from a tree at the University of Colorado in Boulder Thursday after being tranquilized by wildlife officials. The bear, which weighs 150-200 pounds, had wandered into a campus dormitory complex. It was later tagged and released in the Rocky Mountains. (Andy Duann/CU Independent/Associated Press)

FRIGHTENED: Bystanders tried to help a woman hurt in one of four explosions that rattled Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine, Friday. At least 27 people were injured. (Evgeniy Kudrya/AFP/Getty Images)

The coal miners are gone now from Norway’s Svalbard archipelago, deep in the Arctic. But early in the 20th century, the British, Russians, Swedish and Dutch all established outposts along its salmon-filled fiords. Pyramiden—named for the massive peak looming above it—was one such Soviet-era settlement. Though it is now a ghost town, with predatory gulls sweeping its ice-blue skies, evidence of its former purpose is everywhere in ‘Trespassing’ (Moderne Kunst Nürnberg, 117 pages, $40), a study of desolate landscapes that bear the marks of human industry. German photographer Nathalie Grenzhaeuser carefully frames the ground and sky and mechanical constructions, fragmenting space. Orderly rows of metal coils jut from an empty reservoir in front of serrated hills; a wooden armature of uncertain purpose is bleached as pale as the snow that nearly obscures it. Mining operations in the harsh terrain of the Arctic and in the arid west of Australia may once have looked like foreign presences but now have the patina of the indigenous—as well as an aspect of mystery. In one image, a seemingly endless shed of corrugated metal follows a steep slope like a ski jump. Another photo (above) shows the structure’s interior, revealing the rails that carried men in and coal out of the mine itself. We are looking down at almost a 45-degree angle, though it is hard to tell without a figure in the frame. All these scenes are similarly made unsettling by the absence of the humans whose efforts shaped them.

MOVING ON: A woman carried her baby and possessions through debris after a fire razed several shacks in Durban, South Africa, Monday. More than 100 people were left homeless in the Jadhu Place informal settlement. (Rogan Ward/Reuters)

FITTING: A shopkeeper adjusted traditional headgear of a bridegroom on the eve of the Akshaya Tritiya festival in Bhopal, India, Monday. More than 50,000 marriages will occur during the festival. (Sanjeev Gupta/European Pressphoto Agency)

CHECKMATE: Taxi drivers played chess as their cars lined a street during a strike Monday over tariffs for journeys to and from a new Berlin airport. (Thomas Peter/Reuters)

IN GERMANY: A vendor looked on as Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao and German Chancellor Angela Merkel visited the industrial Hanover Fair in Hanover, Germany, Monday. China is the fair’s official partner country this year; about 500 of the 5,000 exhibitors coming from there. (John MacDougall/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images)

‘NO PRESSURE’: Xochitl, 3, a Mexican hairless dog, waited for owner Ana Poe of San Francisco in a restroom at the America’s Family Pet Expo in Costa Mesa, Calif., Thursday. (Cindy Yamanaka/The Orange County Register/Zuma Press)

READY TO LEARN: Students Kadidiatu Swaray, 18, left, and Mabinty Bangura, 15, arrived for class at the Every Nation Academy private school in Makeni, Sierra Leone, Friday. (Finbarr O’Reilly/Reuters)

OFFENDED: North Koreans shouted slogans denouncing South Korean President Lee Myung-bak during a rally Friday at Kim Il Sung Square in Pyongyang. The North Korean government has said Mr. Lee’s recent comments about the country ‘hurt the dignity’ of its people. (Vincent Yu/Associated Press)

IN PAIN: A homeless young woman accused of having premarital sex in public was caned by a sharia police officer at a public square in the town of Langsa, Indonesia, Friday. Aceh is the only Indonesian province that enforces laws based in the teachings of Islam. (Riza Lazuardi/AFP/Getty Images)

MAXIMUM EFFORT: A choir sang during a concert in Pyongyang, North Korea, Monday. The country is celebrating the birth centennial of its founder, Kim Il Sung. (David Guttenfelder/Associated Press)

A HEATED RACE: Cups lay on the ground near a water stop in Wellesley, Mass., during the Boston Marathon Monday. Kenyan Wesley Korir won the men’s division with a heat-slowed time of 2 hours, 12 minutes, 40 seconds. Fellow Kenyan Sharon Cherop won the women’s race. (Michael Dwyer/Associated Press)

STANDING ON A SHOAL: A man stood on the exposed shoal of the Hanjiang River Monday. A lack of rainfall has contributed to a severe drought throughout Hubei province, China. (Cheng Fuhua/Xinhua/Zuma Press)

CASUALTY CONFIRMATION: Afghan police officers used cellphones to photograph the body of an insurgent in a bullet-riddled building in Kabul Monday. At least 36 militants were killed in brazen attacks that began Sunday in the capital and elsewhere. At least 11 victims were killed. (Bay Ismoyo/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images)

DEFIANT: Anders Behring Breivik, who admitted to a July 22, 2011, bomb-and-shooting massacre in Norway, pleaded not guilty on the first day of his trial in Oslo Monday. Mr. Breivik flashed a closed-fist salute in the courtroom. (Odd Andersen/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images)

IN SHOCK: Carole Beckett held her head as she sorted through the rubble of her tornado-damaged home in Woodward, Okla., Sunday. At least six people died in the town as severe storms swept across the area over the weekend. (Bryan Terry/The Oklahoman/Associated Press)